Trill was my first full-scale lesson in entrepreneurship as design practice: a fast-moving experiment in helping audiences discover live performance while building the product, research, content, and operating systems needed to support it. Across a year and a half, we shipped multiple products, ran live events, built a data pipeline from nearly 100 venues, and learned how to keep evolving when product-market fit was still in motion.
Challenge
- Developing an MVP
- Pitching for funding
- Iterating on product market fit
- Noisy market landscape
Approach
- Established a product experimentation engine
- Established a guerilla research engine
- Made everyone a designer
- Killed our darlings
- Built a family
Outcome
- Raised 750k, won two pitch contests, semi finalist in Mass Challenge
- Took 4 great websites, apps, and service models to market
- Ultimately pivoted the app into a self-sustaining nonprofit
Why Trill mattered
I’m most proud of the product development cycle we established at Trill. We ran our whole company on sprints and built up guerilla research processes and just cranked on ideas and improvements and pivots. We released four unique products in a year and a half, ran a live show production company, published newsletters, produced gala launch events, and built a data pipeline from almost 100 venues across Boston. We were scrappy, passionate, creative, and had a tremendous amount of fun.
Highlights from our product experiments:
- Trill.com
- Trill Weekly Curated Newsletter
- Trill Tonight
- Trill Presents
- Trill TEDx
- Trill IRL
